• Source: My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

"My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" is a song written and recorded by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift for her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024). Produced by Swift and Jack Antonoff, it is a synth-pop song featuring marching drums and elements of new wave. The lyrics are about romantic abandonment by an avoidant partner, using metaphors of a toy being no longer of use.
Some critics praised the song's melodic catchiness, while some others were critical of the lyrical imagery as redundant or uninventive. "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" peaked at number six on the Billboard Global 200 and reached the top 10 on charts of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States. Swift performed the song live twice on the Eras Tour in 2024.




Background and release


Swift developed her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, "for about two years" after finishing her previous album Midnights (2022). She reflected on The Tortured Poets Department as a "lifeline" for her, and its conception took place amidst media reports on Swift's personal life and her relationships with Joe Alwyn, Matty Healy, and Travis Kelce. The album was released on April 19, 2024, via Republic Records.
"My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" is track number three on the standard edition; it is one of the two tracks solely written by Swift, the other being "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?". Swift performed the song live on piano, as a "surprise song" outside the regular set list at the second Paris show of her concert tour, the Eras Tour, on May 10, 2024. This performance was recorded and included in a limited-time digital variant of The Tortured Poets Department. She performed the song again on piano, this time as part of a mashup with her 2020 track "Coney Island", at the August 17, 2024, show of the Eras Tour in London.
A "First Draft Memo" version of "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys", a demo recorded by Swift on piano, was released as a bonus track for another limited-time digital variant of the album on August 3, 2024. This version contains several lyrics that were trimmed from the album cut.




Music and lyrics



Swift produced "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" with Jack Antonoff, who programmed the track and played instruments including bass, drums, electric guitar, and synths; Swift herself played the piano on the song. The track was recorded by Laura Sisk and Oli Jacobs, assisted by Jack Manning and Jon Sher, at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles and Electric Lady Studios in New York. Mixing was conducted by Serban Ghenea and engineered by Bryce Bordone at MixStar Studios in Virginia Beach, and mastering was handled by Randy Merrill. Musically, "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" is a mid-tempo synth-pop song that is driven by persistent synths and pounding, marching drums. Maria Sherman of the Associated Press described the production as "new wave-adjacent", while Igor Bannikov of PopMatters compared the marching drums to the styles of My Chemical Romance.
Swift told Amazon Music that "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" was about "being somebody's favorite toy until they break you and then don't want to play with you anymore". She elaborated that the song was about being in denial: "[...] you could live in this world where there's still hope for a toxic, broken relationship." The lyrics describe Swift's narrator from the stance of a toy being abandoned by her deleterious partner, who avoids rather than addresses his problems. The song uses lyrical imagery related to toys, such as melted plastic dolls and destroyed sandcastles on a school playground. The narrator wishes to revisit a failed romance before its breakup: she addresses how her partner gradually lost his interest in her in the pre-chorus ("But you should've seen him when he first got me") and how the couple gave each other another attempt ("There was a litany of reasons why we could've playеd for keeps this time, I know I'm just repeating mysеlf, put me back on my shelf").
The chorus depicts the relationship as unhealthy ("My boy only breaks his favorite toys, toys, oh, I'm queen of sandcastles he destroys") and the love interest as uncaring and destructive ("He saw 'forever' so he smashed it up"). The lyrics, "I felt more when we played pretend, than with all the Kens/ 'Cause he took me out of my box, stole my tortured heart", allude to the lover being a rebound after a recent breakup and reference the male doll Ken in Barbie, inspired by the 2023 popular culture phenomenon Barbenheimer.




Critical reception


Several critics praised the production of "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys". In Billboard, Jason Lipshutz ranked it 17th out of all 31 songs on the double album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, saying that the song "deserves the stadium treatment" and describing it as a "big, booming song". The Hollywood Reporter's Ryan Fish described the song as a "poppy earworm". Several critics picked "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" as a sonic highlight on the album, including Bannikov, No Ripcord's David Coleman, and Beats Per Minute's John Wohlmacher, who further complimented how Swift explores her vocal range on the song. Slant Magazine's Jonathan Keefe and The Daily Telegraph's Neil McCormick thought that the track has a potential to become a radio hit with its catchy hooks.
Vulture's Nate Jones wrote that the song was "sadder than you'd think". Cosmopolitan's Courtney Young ranked it twenty-sixth in her ranking of the top thirty breakup songs by Swift. In her initial review, Business Insider's Callie Ahlgrim said the track was sonically reminiscent of the vault tracks from Swift's 2023 re-recorded album 1989 (Taylor's Version), "so this isn't necessarily a knock in my book". She added that the song failed to stand out because it relied on a "fast-dulling formula". In her post-review article published a week after her initial review, Ahlgrim recategorized the song from "background music" to "worth listening to". Alexis Petridis of The Guardian and Annie Zaleski thought that the lyrics are deftly written. Will Hodgkinson from The Times agreed, but he added that the "standard-issue moody synth-pop backing doesn't match the intrigue of the lyrics".
In negative reviews, an anonymous Paste journalist opined that the song "features another low-point in Swift's lyrical oeuvre" and added that Swift was "capitalizing on the Barbenheimer mania that none of us could escape", while Alex Hudson from Exclaim! said the song was "yet another mid-tempo synthpop plodder". Olivia Horn of Pitchfork contended that the lyrical metaphors are ineffective, "[working] a schoolyard premise until it cracks".




Commercial performance


Upon the release of The Tortured Poets Department, its songs claimed the top 14 positions on the Billboard Global 200. "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" debuted and peaked at number six. In the United States, it debuted at number six on the Billboard Hot 100. The song reached the top ten in charts of Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Philippines and Singapore, attaining peaks of five, six, ten, seven, nine, and seven, respectively. The track also occupied the top 25 positions in Belgium (17), Denmark (17), Greece (11), India (14), Luxembourg (12), Malaysia (11), Portugal (15), South Africa (17), Sweden (13), and the United Arab Emirates (14).




Personnel


Credits adapted from the liner notes of The Tortured Poets Department

Taylor Swift – lead vocals, piano, songwriter, producer
Jack Antonoff – producer, programming, drums, electric guitar, bass, Moog, Juno, M1
Laura Sisk – recording
Oli Jacobs – recording
Jon Sher – assistant engineering
Jack Manning – assistant engineering
Serban Ghenea – mixing
Bryce Bordone – mix engineering
Randy Merrill – mastering
Ryan Smith – vinyl mastering




Charts






Certifications






References






= Source

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Zaleski, Annie (2024). Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs. Headline Publishing Group. ISBN 9781802798586.

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